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‘The 3AW Drive program, presented by Tom Elliott, was told the priest then said that if Ms Meagher had been “more faith-filled” she “would have been home in bed” and “not walking down Sydney Rd at 3am” when she was raped and murdered by Bayley in September 2012.’

Sure, when there is separation between the State and Christianity, Christianity does not commit as many atrocities as it used, before the split. Because it lacks the power, not the will…

Many nice Christians I’ve met are genuinely good people – as are many nice Muslims I’ve met.

Christians are always stressing that theirs is a religion of love and inclusion and everything that is nice and non violent – and I am certain that they honestly believe it.

But the clerics know better.

The clerics are required to study their Holy Scriptures and believe what it says in them, regardless of the public mask worn in public. And, every now and then, that mask slips…revealing the ugly truth beneath: Christianity is, at its core, very misogynistic and just as destructive as every other religion.

Please, do give this some thought: I do not write this lightly or reflexively.

Christianity is not the love-fest many Christians seem to think it is. Biblical morality is deeply flawed. After all, Muhammad had been a Christian convert and got much of his morality from Biblical teachings. Sure, he built on them, from his own predilections, but there are common seeds shared between all three Abrahamic religions and, every now and then, we can glimpse the underlying truth…

It seems to me that Christianity stopped committing atrocities whenever it became separated from actual real, hands-on political power. I suspect that this will be true of all religions, secular (non-theistic) as well as theistic: it is the real-world power combined with a firm and unshakable belief that one is not just correct, but ‘absolutely right’ that produces tyranny.

Since this piece focuses on Christians forming what they hope will be a religious terrorist organization, I naturally focused on Christianity. That, plus Christianity martyred more of my family than any other doctrine – so it’s personal. Of course Communism and Islam are greater threats now than Christianity has been in the 20th century, but my point was that regardless of which religion it is, it can and will be used by some to usurp power over others. If we let them.

As for Jesus whispering similar things to people – I understand your belief in this, but there have been many wars between Christian sects all of whom truly and honestly believed to have Jesus’s true message while the other guys were idiots who were wrong. Just consider the difference between Catholics and Evangelicals on the topic of evolution: Catholics assert it is the means through which the various species were created by God while Evangelicals claim it is Devil’s teachings…

Solzhenitsyn: good book, the Gulag Archipelago. However, Solzhenitsyn himself longed for a totalitarian state himself – he just wanted the tyrant to be the Russian Orthodox Church instead of the Bolsheviks…which is really much the same thing.

As for Buddha: he was not so much enlightened as cowardly. He was in the perfect position to alleviate the suffering of the common folk, being a crown prince and all that. Instead he went and sulked in a cave….and had the nerve to accept food from the poorest of the poor, who thought it was their duty to feed him even if it meant their own children starved. Yeah, great spiritual enlightening there!

And before you go on about the accomplishments of monks who meditate: please consider their diet and that their ‘enlightened meditation’ perfectly fits the symptoms of brain damage due to malnutrition.

I would not go looking for spiritual advice there!

As for God being the foundation of morality. I did not intend to say that since God does not exist, it cannot be the foundation of morality.

I do not know whether god(s) exist or not or how we would define them. I suppose I am very much an ignostic. As such, I would need a clear definition, because different people mean different things when they say ‘God’ – and without knowing what they mean, I cannot possibly hold an opinion, much less knowledge, regarding their existence. (Having said this, I find little to no evidence that supports the existence of Bible-definined deity, and consider monotheism to be the least credible of all the theological positions – but that is not the point here.)

What I was referring to is the continued assertion by Christian apologists that morality is whatever their God defines it to be. So, if God commands genocide, then genocide is the moral thing to do. If selling your daughter to her rapist for 40 silver pieces is what God says is the moral thing to do, then that is indeed the ‘moral’ thing to do.

In other words, many Christians argue that without God, there can be no morality.

Because ‘morality’ is obeying anything and everything that God commands.

I hold the diametrically opposite view: ‘obedience’ to morality dictated from the outside (be it from a parent or God or teapot or whatever else) is exactly that. Obedience.

And obedience, in my never-humble-opinion, precludes morality.

Morality is making decisions about what is right and wrong, what is good, bad or evil. Weighing the consequences of one’s actions – then choosing what to do and living with it. Morality is reasoning from the first principle of self-ownership and deriving the least incorrect course of action therefrom.

Morality is choosing one’s actions and accepting the responsibilities thereof.

Without this decision making process, without internal locust of decision-making, there is no ‘morality’ – only obedience.

After all, how can you be held responsible for following someone else’s rules?

So, to my way of thinking, ‘obeying the word of God’ is abdicating ‘morality’ in favour of ‘obedience’.

Because doing the right thing for the wrong reason does not make you ‘moral’….it makes you, at best, ‘accidentally right’. Because you did not make the choice as to what the moral course of action would be – you simply obeyed the what somebody else decided is the moral course of action.

Sorry to go into this in so much detail, but as I did not make my position clear in the original post, I want to make sure to be more clear in my reply.

To recap: I am not saying that morality cannot come from God since God does not exist: I am saying that obeying somebody else’s rules about what is or is not moral is not morality itself, it is simply obedience because the locust of decision-making about what is or is not moral is external to one-self. And I am perfectly aware that many religious people consider ‘morality’ to be ‘obeying God’s commands’ because they believe they are owned by God (in one manner or another). I acknowledge their belief, but disagree with them. Obedience is not ‘morality’ – or every puppy would be the most ‘moral’ creature in the world!

Of course, being a fact-focused person, I know better than to buy in to the hollow propaganda about this profoundly evil person, who fetishized the suffering of others and maximized it in order to bring about her own salvation. Her clinics did not differentiate between curable and incurable patients and used unsterilized needles for all…as well as denying even child-patients life-saving medical care and all painkillers….’cause, suffering would bring them closer to Jesus!

If the evil bitch Agnes (self-called Mother Theresa, which in itself should be a hint as she was NOT a mother and it is deeply immoral of her to usurp that noble title) is your example of the good things Jesus whispers to people, then you confirm my suspicion that all religions are, at their core, evil incarnate. And that to get good people to commit evil deeds, all you need is religion….

Jesus himself: perhaps we can leave discussion of the Nazarene and his teachings for another day…

As for giving God a chance: I rather like Thor…and Tyr…and Hospodin and Baba Maja. Have you given them a chance?

One thing that differentiates Atheists from religious people is the recognition that regardless of the underlying religious doctrine, believing that one is doing things to please their God can make even good people descend into acts of unspeakable barbarity.

It is the ‘knowledge’ that one is the instrument of ‘The Almighty’ that gives people the impetus to leave their humanity behind and commit acts of unspeakable cruelty.

In many debates between famous theists and Atheists on the topic of morality: every single Christian apologists (whom I have seen – and I follow this a lot) states that ‘morality’ is what God commands.

As in, defining right from wrong is God’s prerogative – and God’s prerogative alone!

If that does not frighten you, the following bi should: many Christians truly and honestly believe that they have a personal relationship with Jesus and that he whispers right and wrong into their ears. And Jesus hardly ever whispers the same things to two different people….

Why am I going into this?

Well, non-Muslims are eager to prove – with actual quotations from their scriptures – that their faith could never be used to justify brutality in the name of their God.

Raise the Crusades with Christians and they’re apt to go off the handle about Muslim aggression and the Crusades being defensive wars. OK – that is true – for somecrusades.

That one was fought by Catholics against Gnostic Christians who were non-violent and wanted nothing other than just to practice their own faith, without interference from the Catholics.

Or the immolation of Jan Hus and the subsequent Crusade to murder anyone who dared disagree with the immolation of the peace-loving priest? The suppression of the disciples of Hus got so brutal that simple folk would have no choice but to take up farm implements to protect themselves and their children from the aggression of the fully armoured, mounted, armed and militarily trained knights!!! Much of my own family – peaceful farmers who just happened to be in the path of the Crusaders and suspected of, may be, perhaps, because of their geopgraphic location, harbouring Hussite sympathies – were butchered in the most horrible ways possible.

These were not Muslim aggressors: these were peaceful Christians who just wanted to practice their faith unmolested by the Pope and his Church tyrants!

And, apart from wars: Christianity was used to impose a tyrannical system of peasantry on the majority of European populace: ‘as above, so below’ was the name of the doctrine which permitted the nobles to own their serfs, rape and kill them at will. It wasn’t until another one of my ancestors, Jan Sladky ‘Kozina’ invited his lord to God’s judgment – and won – that peasants realized that their suffering was not ‘God’s will’ and began the uprisings which eventually ended serfdom in Europe.

So, it comes as little surprise to me that Christianity has spawned its own ‘Christian Taliban’ group.

That is not my assessment: that is what they describe themselves as.

It’s here and it demonstrates that all belief in ‘divine-dictated-morality’ is necessarily going to lead even good people to do evil things.

‘That’s the theory. In practice, Korchynsky wants the war in eastern Ukraine to be a religious war. In his view, you have to take advantage of the situation: Many people in Ukraine are dissatisfied with the new government, its broken institutions and endemic corruption. This can only be solved, he believes, by creating a national elite composed of people determined to wage a sort of Ukrainian jihad against the Russians.

“We need to create something like a Christian Taliban,” he told me. “The Ukrainian state has no chance in a war with Russia, but the Christian Taliban can succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan.”

For Korchynsky and the St. Mary’s Battalion, the Great Satan is Russia.’